How to Go Viral in 10 Easy Steps

In 2014, Pete Frates, a former college Baseball player, challenged some friends and celebrities to pour cold water over their heads to raise money for ALS.

Less than 12 months later, the Ice Bucket Challenge had roped in the sitting President of the United States and reportedly raised $50 million for ALS.

The way the Ice Bucket Challenge shot to viral fame follows a familiar path used by websites like boredpanda.com to get millions of viewers to their site.

While viral marketing probably won’t help your next idea ‘blow up’ like the Ice Bucket Challenge, it can teach you lessons on how to make your content viral that you can apply to your business.

Before we get started, we should cover the obvious.

The chance of viral marketing getting you millions of views is really low (not as low as winning the lottery, but pretty close).

Yet it’s not that hard to get thousands or even tens of thousands of extra clicks to your content if you follow a clear strategy. It all starts with a bit of psychology.

This graph was created by Buzzsumo.

Keep in mind most content is not created to go viral.

1. Choose the Right Topic

Viral marketing works best with certain types of content.

Articles and videos shared online generally amuse, inspire or make people look smart (you know, like you’ve got the inside line on something important).

Then there’s content based on current events, like the hotel manager who sent a € 5.3 million invoice to a social influencer for promoting her business.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have content that goes viral because it is contentious.

This much-cited and shared article in the travel niche, “17 Cultural Clashes this European Had in America,” where the headline could be changed to “17 Reasons I Hate Americans,” is a case in point. (He doesn’t really hate Americans, by the way.)

Depending on your niche, it can be challenging to get this positive or negative emotional response for content you’re creating…

Like finance, for example.

This Accountant Used a New Bookkeeping Method… It Saved Him 3 Hours a Day!

Well. Maybe that headline would get an accountant excited, but you know what I mean :D.

Which brings us nicely to the format you should probably be using for your content… SEO-friendly list posts.

2. Write SEO Friendly List Posts

Arguably the most popular format for content on the web are list style posts.

You can broadly break these list posts into two distinct types.

You’ve got the curated list posts, which is basically an expert roundup and the affiliate/ e-commerce style “10 best + product”.

“Best Hotels in LA:” Twice in the top 10 for an extremely profitable keyword using user-generated content…

One of the most successful companies to apply this list model to their online business is Trip Advisor.

The user-generated content produced on the site ranks on Google for almost every instance of “things to do + city/ region” or “best hotel + city/ region” across the world.

All these SERP rankings give the company a valuation in the region of $8 billion.

There are some very successful online businesses using viral marketing and list posts, with solid keyword research, to grow their business.

A great example of a viral site which does this in the travel niche is tripcanvas.co.

The site makes bank as a hotel affiliate by creating viral list posts on topics like “things to do + city/ region” “best hotels in + city/ region” across Thailand and Indonesia (there’s plenty of scopes to replicate this model across other niches or the same niche in different markets).

To get all those clicks though, you need a good headline…

3. Create A Killer Headline

As newspaper editors have known since, well, newspapers, the hook that gets people reading your content is a good headline.

Most viral marketing headlines have an over the top format. Clickbait style headlines frame the content and often set the emotional tone for what you’re about to experience.

Take this example from one of Upworthy’s first posts below:

Clear Your Next 10 Minutes Because This Video Could Change How Happy You Are With Your Entire Week.

You can see how a good headline pulls you into the article.

It’s all about creating curiosity, generating interest, setting expectations, and generally getting people to take action.

The problem is, while a great headline sounds simple, they are frustratingly difficult to come up with.

4. Make Your Content Easy to Share

Most social sharing plugins give you the option to choose what social share buttons to show and where they should appear on your site.

If you haven’t got social sharing buttons, install them already…

A custom image created for a social media channel will always outperform a regular image.

A custom image created for a social media channel will always outperform a regular image.

While having social sharing buttons on your site is great, I recommend using a social sharing plugin that lets you choose the default image for each social media channel (here’s a list of social share plugins with some that do).

In addition to this, edit the metadata used when your content is shared.

Now you’ve prepared your content, you need to get people to read it.

You should start by emailing your list.

5. Use Email marketing

Email marketing is one of the best ways to get eyes on your newly published content.

You can use a lot of different techniques for promoting your content through email marketing. I like infotainment.

There’s a great article on Vyper written by Danavir from Copymonk about writing infotainment style copy for your content emails. I recommend you read it.

As an aside…

The challenging thing with content marketing for most niches is a lot of the content you are producing are for search engines rather than your audience (after a while people get bored of yet another “how to” article or roundup of “10 best tools” to make you more intelligent).

In the business and marketing niche, a very successful hook that engages readers is the monthly income reports.

Michelle Schroeder from makingsenseofcents.com does this and Dave, one of the founders of Ninja Outreach, did this with his first website acoupletravelers.com.

If you’re successful, this is a good way to establish yourself as an authority in your niche. I digress…